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Author: Sandhya Jain
Publication: Niticentral.com
Date: November 25, 2012
URL: http://www.niticentral.com/2012/11/media-revives-omerta-code-on-vadra.html
Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law Robert Vadra, who reportedly beat a discreet retreat to Dubai after India Against Corruption activists Arvind Kejriwal and Prashant Bhushan exposed his real estate deals in Delhi-NCR, Haryana and Rajasthan last month, made a surprise appearance at The Hindustan Times’ annual Leadership Summit on November 17, 2012.
He could easily be rated as the second ‘star guest’ of the gathering, top billing going to Pakistan’s former dictator General Pervez Musharraf who weakly reiterated his tired old formula that India being the bigger power should be “generous” to ‘little’ Pakistan, possibly a reference to the Siachen Glacier where some ardent Aman ki Asha types are trying to enforce an Indian retreat despite stiff resistance from the Army. The rest of the gathering was the usual media-corporate-actor-socialite Page Three crowd that had nothing new to say even in terms of catchy sound bytes.
In fact, in the entire gathering Robert Vadra stood out as an entrepreneur-newsmaker in his own right. He has made the swiftest accumulation of wealth in real estate at dizzying speed, with a known capital of just Rs 50 lakh. By a strange coincidence, this is the exact amount with which Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi acquired the shares of The Associated Journals Ltd for their private firm Young Indian, whereby they are poised to take charge of the properties and assets (whose value is believed to run into thousands of crores of rupees) of National Herald and allied newspapers across the country.
The unexpected resurfacing of the non-Mango Man in the world’s most democratic Banana Republic should have sent the top-notch print and television journalists present at the function scrambling for an interview, quote, off-the-record conversation, anything to show their respective audiences that they were on their toes, gathering news even at social events mainly utilised for networking. After all, converting Rs 50 lakh into assets worth Rs 500 crore is no small feat, and the public could do with a little ‘insight’.
Vadra could and should have been asked to expound his future political plans, if any. After all, married into the Congress’s controlling dynasty, he publicly articulated a desire to carve a personal niche in politics during the recent Uttar Pradesh Assembly election. Another question that should legitimately have been asked is why he reportedly spends so much time abroad these days.
Of course, none of that happened. What his presence at the HT Leadership Summit did establish is the sad fact that the mainstream media has reinstated the Omerta Code for the Nehru-Gandhi Dynasty. No one asked him any questions, and in fact he seems to have got the polite distancing treatment. Nor were there any explanatory stories the next day from ‘hitherto reliable sources’. The heavy duty news hounds present behaved as if they had not seen him, and for the Congress and its first family, it was business as usual.
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